Like Water
by K. Elisabeth
Summary: Rachel and Quinn learn what it means to find themselves, and each other. Originally a one-shot, but expanded to multi-chap after some nudging. Faberry, Brittana, in progress.
1. What the Water Gave Me

**A/N:** This was a prompt from my dear friend Mar (willowtreemuse). Hope it meets your expectations, love! :)

* * *

"Hey."

Quinn jumped at the sound of someone else's voice carrying through the courtyard. Most of the school had long since disappeared, leaving only a few classrooms occupied by lingering clubs and overworked teachers. Glee club had ended almost twenty minutes ago, and Quinn's mentee of questionable morals had left quickly, head down and shoulders rounded forward. They'd all made nice after the fiasco at Sectionals, with Marley in counseling and Kitty on the fringe of most of her social groups. Now with Mr. Schue back from Washington and Finn in the passenger's seat, things seemed tense, but acceptable.

Quinn felt for Kitty, in a way—she knew the feeling of never quite fitting in. She too had ostracized herself from the glee club, only to realize that her participation with them had left her outside her Cheerios circle as well. One foot in both worlds meant she didn't feel like she had firm standing in either. Fortunately she had been wrong about that, at least—she always had a place in glee club. For some reason they kept welcoming her back, no matter what she did to them. She knew Kitty would get the same treatment. Mr. Schue was like Saint Jude in his love for a lost cause, and that mean, twisted little cheerleader definitely qualified.

Admitting that to Santana had been a real bitch, though. She hadn't wanted to concede to the accuracy of the _Mexican third eye_, but Santana was always right about those things—Finn cheating, Karofsky's sexuality, and now Kitty's laxative sabotage. Quinn inwardly counted her blessings that she listed Santana among her friends, because she would make one hell of an enemy. Brittany helped tame her, but just.

It was actually Santana who she had expected to see standing at the top of the stairs leading down into the quad, still littered with hamburger wrappers, soda bottles (now contraband in a school that banned soda from vending machines), and a few conspicuous small plastic baggies. She felt the cold early-spring air catch in her lungs when she realized it was not Santana, but Rachel who was standing ten feet above her on the concrete steps, pea coat wrapped tightly around her small frame. Quinn furrowed her brows, but smiled all the same.

"Hey," she returned, lifting her chin approvingly as Rachel met her at the bottom of the steps. She may not be wearing animal sweaters anymore, but there was still something about her that just begged to be given a sticker for effort. "I thought you were staying in New York this weekend."

"Well, I was…" she began, in a fashion that suggested it was another long-winded Rachel Berry story. Quinn settled back on her heels, hands deep in her coat pocket, waiting for the tale to unfold. Instead, however, Rachel paused, surveying her slowly. Her eyes moved lazily up and down Quinn's shape, down from her eyes, slowly skimming her coat front, catching around her buttons and tracing the clean line of her jeans down to her heels and back up again. Quinn felt the peculiar need to swallow, and despite the late afternoon sun hovering along the top edge of the steps, she felt very warm. Finally, rather than launching into the tale, Rachel simply scrunched her nose a little and smiled. "I just changed my mind, is all."

"Oh," Quinn said softly, taking her lower lip between her front teeth momentarily before giving a little head shake and refocusing on Rachel's eyes. If she could just hold them, her own would not falter. She had an overwhelming desire to acquaint herself with the cut of Rachel's jeans.

"Seems like you've been here a lot lately," Rachel said, bringing Quinn back to the present. She swayed a little and pointing her shoulder in Quinn's direction as if to say, your go.

"I have," Quinn agreed. "Helping with the glee club. Mentoring, you know. Things got kind of crazy, Finn asked for my help. Santana, too, and Mercedes, Mike, you know," she added quickly, seeing the way Rachel's face darkened for the briefest of moments at the mention of Finn's name. It was more subconscious than anything, and Rachel quickly brightened, but it was still there. That name had always fallen heavy between them, rippling outward and pushing them in opposite directions. They stood in silence for a moment, with Quinn painfully aware of her own breath, before Rachel spoke again.

"I hope that hasn't been disturbing your, ah, thriving social life in New Haven. I hear you've been meeting a lot of important people, and seeing someone?" she posed as both a statement and question. She looked cautious. Why did she look like she was about to trip a live wire? Quinn pressed her lips together and shook her head.

"Was," she said. "I was seeing someone. I, well… it just wasn't a good idea." She ended with a voice much smaller than she had intended, and immediately hated herself for it. "Besides," she perked up, louder and brighter as if in compensation for her unintended vulnerability. "I needed some time for me. I didn't spend much time single in high school. It's good to just be me and figure out who I am, what I need. What I actually want, you know?"

"I totally agree," Rachel said, looking almost too pleased with herself. "I've been feeling the same way. I kind of started seeing someone, but… well, like you said, I need some time for me. I kind of felt like I lost myself a little with Finn. I needed time to find me again." A gust of wind blew through the quad and sent some of Quinn's hair askew. Before she could address it Rachel took a step towards her, toe to toe, and tucked the loose pieces behind Quinn's ear. The tip of her finger just barely grazed Quinn's jaw as she withdrew her hand, and Quinn felt a static ripple over her skin that had very little to do with the breeze.

"And have you?" Quinn asked, not quite sure how the words were making their way out of her mouth at this point, as her lungs seemed absolutely void of air. "Found yourself, I mean."

Rachel didn't answer, but instead, watched a mix of emotions flash across Quinn's features, almost imperceptible. She was nearly impossible to read, always had been. Trying to infer her emotions from her facial expressions was like staring into a pond—you only ever saw a reflection of yourself, or nothing; a sudden, shocking erratic shift, some disturbance breaking the surface. Sometimes Rachel wondered if Quinn even had her own distinct expressions, or if she was like water—unknowable, taking the form of whatever lay before her, turning into herself only when you were not there to see.

The only real sign she gave was in her hands, the way her fingers twisted the fringe of the red scarf angrily, as if it were not a scarf at all, but a noose. Quinn's eyes flicked from left to right, pointedly avoiding Rachel's gaze, and she would not look directly at her until Rachel reached out and placed a hand over hers. The fidgeting stopped immediately as she wrapped her hand around Quinn's, startled by the cold shock of her fingers against her own warm palm. She was wrong, Quinn was not water—she was a winter lake, caught beneath miles of deep freeze, clawing the ice frenetically for cracks.

"I think so," Rachel finally said, leaning forward a fraction, staring not at Quinn's eyes but the gentle bow of her lip. She let go of Quinn's anxious hand and rested both of hers on the lapels of the blonde's jacket, smoothing them down and quite aware of just how close she was inching towards disaster. "You?"

Quinn's breath caught in her chest and she did not speak, but leaned forward abruptly and bridged the incredibly small gap between their mouths. The first kiss was quick, more of a peck than anything, lips barely grazing before she yanked back as if she'd been shocked. Her eyes were wide and, for the first time in all the years Rachel had known her, truly afraid. The world was spinning violently, and the only feeling she was aware of was Rachel holding the front of her jacket, keeping her rooted to the face of the earth with just her small, sure grasp.

Rachel leaned into the second kiss, pulling Quinn close to her and down a fraction, smiling into the gesture. Quinn seemed to become aware of her body again, and suddenly there was no ice anymore—only water, only water, everywhere and nowhere, her lips drunk on it, body floating in it, caught in its fierce spinning, breaking the surface for air, boiling, rising, everywhere, everywhere, water.


	2. Quiet Things That No One Ever Knows

**A/N:** Sooo I didn't think this would be more than a one-shot, but after some feedback and gentle nudging I decided to keep going with it. :) I don't know how many chapters it will end up being, but there will be at least 2-3 more. With that said, enjoy and let me know what you think!

* * *

Running was absolutely not what Quinn had intended to do, but her feet seemed to be operating on their own agenda.

"I… I have to go," was all she said when she and Rachel's lips parted, and Rachel gave a little nod and let go of her lapels. Quinn took a few steps back, then up the stairs, out of the lunch quad, and quickly picked up a jog down the halls of McKinley and out into the parking lot. She was heaving in short, cold gasps of breath by the time she reached her car on the far end of the lot. Without Cheerios and glee dance numbers, she had admittedly fallen a bit out of shape. However, the quick spurt of aerobic exercise only scratched the surface of why her heart was hammering in her ears.

She had an exceptional talent for running away. It had always been her natural impulse in the face of uncomfortable emotions. By age six she had perfected the art of storming out of a room, which commanded nominally greater respect than simply running out in tears, and it was actually the taunting of her middle school peers that had prompted her to join cross country and drop all the extra weight. Running then wasn't so bad—she could lace up her shoes and jog for miles along the heavily wooded trails in the wooded lot behind their old neighborhood, unfettered by the teasing and ruthless cruelty of her classmates, or her father. It felt like something she could do that would literally put space between her and her problems, even if only for a moment. Only until her feet quit and her lungs ached and she remembered that so very rarely are we lucky enough to be able to actually outrun our problems. Angry dogs, killer bees, pitchfork mobs. Those were life's little blessings. Most problems curl up behind our ears and wait until the silent moments between heartbeats to whisper to us—_I'm not going anywhere, but thanks for the ride._

Whenever she found herself thinking about it, she came close to the intensely uncomfortable realization that Yale was another attempt at running away, hidden beneath the guise of "getting out of Ohio", which was what everyone with good sense aimed to do. And it was a good plan; smart, solid, a plan with possibilities and ambition and regard. But she didn't choose Yale because it was Yale—she chose it because it was somewhere she had never been, with people she had never seen, just far enough that Ohio couldn't drop in unannounced. She was running. She ran right into the arms of that damn professor, too, and then just as quickly out of them once she realized why she thought she wanted him in the first place. It's harder to hear that little voice behind your ear when you're moaning his name during office hours, but it's still there. When the fan blades are spinning in the middle of the night, between each gentle whoosh, you hear it.

She was hearing precisely that voice as she sank down into the car, cranking up the defroster to melt away the late afternoon ice that was just beginning to creep along the bottom half of her windshield. _You're running again—you've been running for years. How much longer do you think you can do it?_ They call it 'finding yourself', but that's a load of shit. They ought to call it 'unburying yourself.' Every time she felt like she had a breakthrough, it was only ever digging herself out from underneath one problem, just to collapse beneath the weight of another. She got pretty, then she got pregnant. She swapped one boyfriend for another, then for the first, and then it seemed nobody wanted her. She didn't even want herself.

So she made a new Quinn, and then a newer one. Pretty, punk, reformed, Yalie. She had gone through so many shades of herself just trying to find a version others could tolerate—a skin that didn't feel cracked at the knuckles and split at the cheeks—that she had managed to completely ignore the person she actually was underneath all of that. How many layers, how many personalities, would she have to peel away before she could actually say she'd 'found' herself anyway? How did she get so lost in the first place?

All of this introspection made her head spin. It was worse than her Philosophy survey course, and that was saying something, considering as they spent an entire week lecturing entirely about pushing theoretical villagers in front of a train. Quinn thought she would drive home, but ended up spinning her wheels for almost an hour aimlessly around Lima. She drove past Breadstix, past the mall, down as far as the edge of where Lima met Lima Heights Adjacent, then turned and took the long road around the business complex Rachel's dad Hiram worked in—_there she was again, always behind her ear_—and finally home.

She was relieved to see nobody else was home. Her mom spent most of her evenings anymore with her new boyfriend Paul, which pleased Quinn, and not just because it got Judy out of her hair on weekend visits. She really liked Paul; he was a good guy, much better for her mother than her father had ever been. At Thanksgiving he asked Quinn about herself and actually listened to the answers, and her older sister had given him a rave review after their Christmas vacation up to visit her and her fiancé. All in all, a really good guy. The kind of guy Quinn should try to find for herself one day.

Quinn suddenly felt sick, and paused at the front door before she opened it, afraid she might need to throw up into the bushes, something she had not done since Puck drove her home after a rowdy party junior year. She smirked at the memory, then felt a fresh wave of nausea hit her as she thought about Puck, and Rachel, and Finn, and Rachel, and the professor, and Rachel. She closed the door and leaned her forehead against it with a gentle thud, taking slow, calming breaths until—

"What's wrong with you? You look like you're gonna hurl." Quinn started and spun around to find Santana Lopez sitting on a barstool in her kitchen, helping herself to a bowl of cereal as she side-eyed her warily from down the short hallway.

"Santana?"

"Yeah?"

"Why are you in my house?"

"Dame Judy let me in before she left with what's-his-face, the guy with the golf shirts."

"Paul," Quinn said, steadying herself after her shock and walking into the kitchen.

"Right," Santana said with a dismissive hand wave, dripping milk onto the counter. She looked down, scrunched her nose, and wiped it clean with the sleeve of her Cardinals hoodie.

"I didn't think you were in town," Quinn said, shaking off her jacket and laying it carefully over the back of the couch in the adjacent living room.

"Well, surprise," Santana said. "I decided that being right about your demented little Bad Seed at Sectionals was enough to forgive you for slapping me, and I wanted to catch up. We haven't really talked much since then."

"Yeah, sorry about that, I've been… busy," Quinn said absently, opening the fridge door and scanning the mostly bare shelves.

"You're out of milk, by the way," Santana said, slurping the last of it from her bowl.

"Right," Quinn said.

"Where have you been, anyway? I thought you would've been home like, an hour ago."

"I was at school," Quinn said carefully. "Helping out at rehearsal…"

"Which ended over an hour ago."

"… and then catching up with Rachel," she said. She felt her face burn at the mention of her name, but couldn't think up a decent lie with her head still swimming. She took out a pint of ice cream, despite the frigid temperature outside, and hoped the cold air from the open freezer door would stop her from flushing noticeably.

"I didn't know the hobbit came back to the shire for spring break," Santana snarked, moving past Quinn to rinse out her bowl and spoon. "Well, now that you're done making out with Berry, you wanna go do hot yoga or something?"

Quinn did not hear the end of her question over the sound of the bowl in her hands dropping to the tile, shattering and sending ceramic flying across the room. Santana's eyes widened in surprise as Quinn simply stared at her, face blanched, hands still cupped as if they were holding the bowl that was no longer there.

"Shit! Are you okay?"

"I'm fine, it just, it slipped. I'm sorry," Quinn said, crouching down on her knees carefully and picking up the largest of the shards with her bare hands. Santana hoisted her up by her shoulder, though, and pushed her gently towards the living room.

"You sit," she said firmly. "You look like hell, are you sure you're okay?"

_Run, run, run._

"I'm fine."

"Uh huh," Santana said, pursing her lips and clearly not content to be placated by Quinn's unconvincing affirmations. Quinn never lost her composure, but she looked jumpy and distracted as she sat on the couch with her hands in her lap, watching Santana sweep up the mess. Santana put the broom away and plunked down cross-legged on the couch next to Quinn, turning sideways to face her and holding a pillow in her lap.

"So are you gonna tell me what's going on, or am I gonna have to waterboard you?" she asked. Quinn paused for a long time before she spoke—so long that Santana began to wonder if she was even going to speak to her at all.

"What's it like, living in Louisville?" she finally asked, catching Santana completely off-guard.

"What?"

"What's it like?" she repeated. Santana furrowed her brows, but assumed this had to be leading somewhere, so she went with it.

"Louisville? Kind of hot," she said, and the way Santana's mouth rounded around the word—_Lou-uh-vuhl_, rather than the more northern _Louie-ville_—was foreign and endearing to Quinn. "Really loud, hard to sleep. Cities make a lot of noise, you don't realize until you live in one, but they're loud all night. You can't hear crickets like you do here." Quinn smirked; Santana would talk about sleep, of all things. Next to eating and tormenting her friends, acquaintances, and random strangers, it was probably one of her favorite ways to pass time. "Why?"

"Is it easier to be out in the city than it was here?" Quinn asked. Santana was at an utter loss as to where she was going with this. She shrugged.

"I dunno, I guess," she said. "Most people don't notice—it's not like I've got a J-Biebs haircut and steel-toed boots or anything. I mean, I'm open about it, people know I have a girlfriend—" Quinn did not correct her for using the present tense even though she and Brittany were not yet technically back together, though they were both single now and for all intents and purposes were a couple. "—but it's not something I have to think about every day. I guess that's different, I don't think about it all the time, I just am. In Lima everyone's so up in your business, it was kind of hard at first. Brit came to visit me in Louisville right near the end of winter break, and we walked around downtown, and we held hands. Nobody noticed. Nobody seemed to really care. That's nice, yeah—not having people stare like something's wrong with you."

"That's… that's good," Quinn said, not looking at Santana's quizzical gaze.

"Q, what's going on? Talk to me." Quinn was taken aback by the sudden softness in Santana's voice. She so rarely spoke without the harshness and barbs in her tone, it was almost like a different person speaking altogether. Quinn stared at a spot on the far wall for another long stretch of time, eyes moving back and forth, as if she were looking at something Santana could not see. When she spoke again, her voice was so raw and gritty that now Santana was the one with a stomachache.

"Why did you date so many guys before you came out?" she asked, each word slow and careful, like she'd found them on the wall in the empty space and strung them together. Santana suddenly felt very much like she knew why she was being asked all these questions. She leaned back into the couch, scooting over until her shoulder pressed against Quinn's, and crossed her ankles on the coffee table.

"Because I thought if I just dated enough of them, I'd find one who made me feel the way I had always felt about girls," she said simply, reaching out and taking Quinn's hand. She gave her a kind smile before continuing. "I kept thinking, this isn't right, this can't be right, I just haven't found the _right_ guy yet. I thought if I just had sex with enough of them, I'd break the curse, you know? Like, maybe they were just all terrible in bed, or they didn't _get me_. I didn't want to think that maybe it was _me_ who just didn't like it, _me_ who couldn't fall in love with a guy, _me_ who was different. That was hard… when you figure it out, like, really sit down and look in the mirror and realize that you can't run from it. You can't change the person, even if you change the scenery—" She emphasized 'scenery' in a peculiar way that made Quinn feel as if Santana was looking into her head, a feeling she had only experienced maybe once in her life. "—because at the end of the day, _sabes qué_, you're still you, and that isn't gonna change."

Santana fell silent, and they sat that way for a while, Quinn holding tight to her hand like she might fall off the couch, off the planet, if she let go. Quinn sank down and rested her head on Santana's shoulder, and it wasn't until she felt something warm and wet soak through the shoulder that she even realized Quinn was crying. Santana wrapped her arms around her and she began to sob openly, hanging onto Santana's hoodie and hiding her face in her shoulder, shaking with tears. She didn't say anything, for over an hour. She just cried.

Santana cried too, for her, because she knew. She knew how that felt—realizing that you've spent your entire life pretending to look for yourself, because you already knew who you were and did not want it to be true. So you looked in different places, different social groups, different wardrobes, different bottles, different one-night stands and unstable relationships. You wander as far down the path of self-destruction as your own two feet can carry you because finding yourself, that's not even half the battle. What people think is 'finding themselves' really isn't about finding yourself at all. It's learning how to love what you find.

She understood that, and for that, for Quinn, she wept.


End file.
